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Legal battles are promised if President Trump moves to shrink the size of national monuments, including one near Grand Canyon National Park/Rebecca Latson file

Reports that the Trump administration is eyeing six national monuments in the West for energy development drew promises Thursday that any reduction in a monument's boundaries would be met with a lawsuit.

According to the Washington Post, the administration was considering boundary shifts in Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to allow for energy development.

The monuments, located in California, New Mexico, and Utah combined encompass more than 5 million acres of public lands.

The newspaper, sourcing its information from two people familiar with Interior Department deliberations, reported that the department was reviewing geologic information to determine whether any commercial energy deposits existed within the monuments.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on his first day, issued a secretarial order calling for a review of all federal lands withdrawn from fossil fuel and mining development, including national monuments.  At the same time, he tasked his assistants to "review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands."

In the wake of the newspaper's report, Earthjustice lawyers said, "[A]n attack on any of these national monuments would be illegal.”

Drew Caputo, the law firm's vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife, and oceans, added that, "[F]or the Trump administration to consider handing over our beloved national monuments to industry is both shortsighted and completely unnecessary. There’s a reason tribes, local communities, and small businesses have fought for decades to protect these places: their cultural and historic significance, combined with their astounding natural beauty and biological value, make them among our most important public lands.”

The turning of the administration's attention to public lands meets with President Donald Trump's "Drill, baby, drill" mantra, and follows the wishes of Project 2025, a conservative manifesto for how the country should be run. One of the requests made by the document's authors is that Trump again shrink national monuments as he did in 2017, chopping a combined 2 million acres from the Grand Staircase and Bears Ears monuments in Utah.

Such a move, however, is opposed by hundreds of locally elected officials in the West, as well as voters, who have voiced strong support for protecting public lands for recreation. According to the 15th annual Conservation in the West poll by Colorado College, nearly three-quarters of those who live in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — including self-identified “MAGA” voters — don't want national monuments to be reduced in size or opened to energy development.

A similar number want Congress to put more emphasis on clean water, clean air, and wildlife habitat than on maximizing the amount of public land available for oil and gas drilling or mining, the survey found.

“Communities across the American West recognize the importance of our national monuments. These lands sustain our way of life, power our economies, and provide habitat for key species," Anna Peterson, executive director of Mountain Pact, said Thursday. "Over 5 million people visit the Grand Canyon each year, generating over $1 billion in economic output for northern Arizona communities. The Grand Canyon is central to the identity of Arizonans and sacred to the indigenous people who have called this land home since time immemorial. Opening the land around the crown jewel of our national parks and a Natural Wonder of the World to mining and drilling threatens to endanger a vital natural and cultural resource. 

“There is still time for the Trump administration to stop this poorly-thought out proposal from moving forward and to protect the national monuments that so many Western communities rely on," she added.

While Trump during his first administration, responding to frustrations from Utah officials upset with the size of both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, did greatly reduce the acreage of the two monuments, President Joe Biden reversed that action. That reversal, along with threatened litigation, evidently prevented a hard-rock mine from going into an area within the Grand Staircase monument.

After Trump's reduction in the monument's boundaries Glacier Lake Resources, Inc., a Canadian company, purchased the Colt Mesa mine and its deposits of copper and cobalt, along with zinc, nickel, and molybdenum. At the time, the Conservation Lands Foundation, Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, and Society for Vertebrate Paleontology announced they were evaluating any and all remedies to stop the mine from resuming operations. According to the three, the area "supports a delicate desert ecosystem and a landscape enclosed in cliff walls, rich in Triassic era fossil deposits, which is unique and was included in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to protect it from disturbance by mining."

Various financial news sites reported Thursday that Glacier Lake's stock was valued at just two cents a share, and that the company had an overall market valuation of less than $450,000. While the sites said the company had interests in mines in British Columbia and South Africa, there was no mention of a Utah operation.

If the Trump administration does move to realign the boundaries of a monument, it no doubt will revive a lawsuit over whether a president can do so. 

Still pending from Trump's shrinking of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase back in 2017 is a federal lawsuit by conservationists contending that presidents lack authority to reduce the size of monuments created via The Antiquities Act, which authorizes presidents to establish new national monuments on federal lands.

Any litigation that reaches the U.S. Supreme Court might find a friendly audience there, as Chief Justice John Roberts in 2021 voiced intrigue over the question of how big was too big for a presidentially-designated monument.

While the high court declined to consider an appeal of a lawsuit over commercial fishing in Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument off the East Coast, the chief justice said part of the problem with the case was that the fishermen failed to explain what would be too big in designation of a national monument.

"No court of appeals has addressed the questions raised above about how to interpret The Antiquities Act’s 'smallest area compatible' requirement. The D. C. Circuit ... held that petitioners did not plead sufficient facts to assess their claim that the Monument swept beyond the 'smallest area compatible' with management of the ecosystem," Roberts wrote in a sidenote after the court declined to consider the case. "To date, petitioners have not suggested what this critical statutory phrase means or what standard might guide our review of the President’s actions in this area."